Hiring New Employees 3

[ntattose]

We need one new engineer and two drafters. We have been placing adds for several weeks
and have not heard from any qualified applicants. Has anyone else had this problem?
How are you dealing with it?

 

[271828]

Contact the structural engineering professors at the nearest university or universities. Similar with drafters. Send a one-page PDF file advertisement for the positions to distribute to their classes.

I wouldn't expect to have much luck in today's world with random advertisements.

 

[ntattose]

That's one of the problems. We live in a town of 50,000. No larger cities within
100 miles. Nearest school with an engineering program is 100 miles away. No tech
schools offering drafting. The kids here that go to engineering and architecture
school head off to the city as soon as they graduate. Staffing has always been
challenging but manageable. Now there's just no one out there.

 

[LittleInch]

Remote drafting?

Engineers I guess you need to see them, but drafting - nowadays?

If you've got no entry level inputs then it will soon wither and die, literally.

A bit like Indian street typists....

Remember - More details = better answers
Also: If you get a response it's polite to respond to it.

 

[JoshPlumSE]

We need one new engineer and two drafters. We have been placing adds for several weeks
and have not heard from any qualified applicants. Has anyone else had this problem?
How are you dealing with it?

Yes, I have experienced this problem with a couple of different companies. The best way to resolve this is to form a relationship with the nearest universities or university professors. This can be done in multiple ways:

a) Offer summer internships for students.
b) Be a guest speaker with a professor's class. Or, with the student chapter of ASCE or SEA.
c) Attend college career fairs, and have a posting in their job board most years.

Granted, this was the solution when I was at a couple of companies that were probably a lot bigger than yours and could easily accept a new grad / intern without it being a big thing.

Another idea is to be more active in the local SEA chapter. When you're regularly attending those meetings, you're getting good networking. Sometimes, one of the larger companies can give their employees a heads-up about your company if they know they're going to have to reduce staff. Of, they can point some new grads in your direction if they don't have enough openings to accommodate them.

 

[rb1957]

are you advertising for new grads or for people with 10 years and X000 hrs of some specific CAD ?

particularly if you're in a small town, could you approach a design c/- in a larger town that works in the same field and say
"can we hire a couple of your guys for X months ?" (ie locate some staff in our office)
I can see this being beneficial to both parties.

Is this demand for a project (short time period) or long term (permanent) ?

another day in paradise, or is paradise one day closer ?

 

[JLNJ]

Lack of drafting skill and available talent is an ongoing and increasing problem.

Good drafters are more valuable than new graduates and should be paid accordingly. I suppose the new engineers will end up having to do all the drafting. Too bad, it's a great career for someone without a degree.

 

[SandwichEngine]

I posted a whole thread about basically this.

https://www.eng-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=496599

In addition to doing job postings, I'm actively trying to find qualified candidates on LinkedIn and anywhere else I can find them.

My first piece of advice though would be to allow fully remote. Now you have the whole country at your disposal. I limit my hires to the time zones on either side of us and ours but that's still the vast majority of the country. A lot of very qualified people who got a taste of fully remote are never going back if they can help it.

The next piece would be to consider that the last two years have summed up to about 20% in inflation. You may be able to retain your current hires without bringing them up that much but I don't think you can expect the same from an experienced new hire. That's probably one of the main reasons they're looking for something new.

 

[MotorCity]

The lack of job candidates is not unique to the engineering field. There are "Help Wanted" signs everywhere. Finding candidates, let alone qualified candidates, is a struggle in the current social climate. In the event that you win the hiring lottery and actually fill the position, keeping the candidate becomes an even bigger challenge. Just because he/she accepted your position does not mean they have stopped looking....it just means they found a place to stop and collect a paycheck until the next recruiter offers a job paying $1000 more a year.

 

[1503-44]

Why the time zone limit? Send your sketches to Romania or XYZone and wake up with your drawings ready to review at breakfast.

If employers kept up with market prices, they wouldn't be moving on much at all. Changing jobs is outside the comfort zone and is full of stress that most people would prefer avoid if practical, yet many employers think employment is a one-sided, lifetime, fixed rate contract.

Einstein gave the same test to students every year. When asked why he would do something like that, "Because the answers had changed."

 

[SandwichEngine]

1503-44,

We do use contractors across the globe for some things. For others, we need to be able to actively collaborate over Microsoft Teams during a normal workday. For those positions, I feel being 2 timezones away is too much. We're in central time so if we start at 7:00, someone on the west coast would have to either be starting 2 hours later or would be forced to start at 5:00 am. I don't see that as feasible long term.

 

[rb1957]

"consider that the last two years have summed up to about 20% in inflation" ... really ??

any data ?

another day in paradise, or is paradise one day closer ?

 

[RattlinBog]

I don't have anything useful to add to the discussion here, but I did want to cite the Bureau of Labor Statistics for CPI data regarding the inflation question.

https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CUU...=XGtable&output_view=data&include_graphs=true

CPI for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U)
All items in US city average, all urban consumers, not seasonally adjusted
June 2020 CPI: 257.797
June 2022 CPI: 296.311
% change in two years = 14.9%

 

[rb1957]

damn!

I guess printing money for COVID will do that ?

another day in paradise, or is paradise one day closer ?

 

[JStructsteel]

Why do you need the engineer to be in the office 40 hours a week? If a drafter can draft from the moon, why cant a engineer engineer from the moon?

 

[ntattose]

I don't nessaceraly need an engineer
in the office but I can't find any to work remotely. As for drafters, I'm more comfortable with them in the office

 

[Buleeek]

ntattose,

Maybe advertising on social media (LinkedIn?) that you are looking for remote engineers would help?
I work remotely and when I looked for clients (engineering firms) I was surprised how many actually wrote back and immediately gave me a job.

I worked for several years full time in the office but once I gained some experience I decided to work remotely and I love it. Most of all, I can work with different engineering offices and learn a lot of new things.


If you like we can discuss working together on a contract basis. I am operating on the East coast.

 

[1503-44]

Sandwich,

Understood, but 2h difference is not all that bad. When working in the mideast with European enginering contractors, besides the 2 or 3hr difference, they of course worked Monday to Friday, we worked Saturday to Wednesday. THAT gets a bit complicated. The mideast countries have since changed to Friday-Saturday weekends. Better, but still PIA. Personally I liked Thurs-Friday off better than Fri-Sat. Never got used to that change. Strange after becoming accustomed to changing from Sat-Sun to Thurs-Fri initially, you'd think any change at all after that would be easy. Keeping up with your stateside bank account was way too difficult. Eventually I dropped US bank accounts entirely. Before the days of Internet banking and zoom calls and all. International calls were too costly to get put on hold for 30min.

Einstein gave the same test to students every year. When asked why he would do something like that, "Because the answers had changed."

 

[JedClampett]

Have you looked into headhunters?
Pros:
[ul]
[li]They get paid to find you someone.[/li]
[li]They have a rolodex (whatever that's called now) full of qualified applicants.[/li]
[li]They take a lot of the screening off your plate.[/li]
[/ul]
Cons:
[ul]
[li]They get paid to find you someone.[/li]
[li]They might try to talk you into buying a size 7 1/2 shoe when you're an 8 1/2.[/li]
[li]Once an individual has been headhunted, the headhunter knows what buttons to push for the next time. But you'll get at least the minimum term from them.[/li]
[/ul]